Posts Tagged ‘georgia’

A new type of narrative is taking hold among the coverage of the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. A number of sites are writing about the “cyberwarfare” being waged by pro-Russian forces against the Georgian government. It seems that, like Estonia a year ago, entities evoking the ire of Russia must be forced to combat widespread botnet-based DDoS attacks. I think there is little doubt that such occurrences will be increasingly part of real-world conflicts, but people are rushing into framing this as warfare, which will only lead to military-based reactions – something I fear.

But before we irrevocably frame the issue as one of war, we need to ask if it even is so. Last year during the Estonia attacks, Tim Lee wrote a post arguing that what was happening was little more than petty vandalism. While the media reported that the government, banks and media in Estonia were being targeted, it was really only their public websites. He asked, would the average American even notice if Congress’s website was down?

“I suppose it would be a bit of a pain if I wasn’t able to check CNN or my bank account balance. But that’s not “cyber war.” It’s petty vandalism. It deserves the attention of network security experts at the companies whose websites were targetted, of course, but it’s ridiculous to get NATO involved or to act as though Russia engaging in this kind of “cyber warfare” is even remotely on par with Russia launching cruise missiles against Estonian targets.”

Although in Georgia, obviously, real war is taking place, the cyberattacks don’t seem to be taking down critical infrastructure. Instead, the websites of government ministries have been compromised. In response, the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has created a blog using Google’s hosted service. With Google’s network engineers protecting the integrity of the site, the ministry can use it to provide information updates. Will other governments come to depend on hosted solutions for their websites? So far consumers and commerce have taken to cloud computing with a vengeance, and one wonders if government, too, will do so. The same benefits of outsourcing internal IT will make it useful for governments to host their websites at specialized hosting services.